Merging domains — important things to consider when you feel the urge to merge

photo credit: Kevin Steele

A friend recently asked me for a bit of advice regard­ing mer­ging two cor­por­ate domains. Two organ­iz­a­tions, with sim­ilar or com­pli­ment­ary lines of busi­ness are now one. What to do about the left-over web­sites. A quandary.

Below I’ve out­lined 6 areas to con­sider, but I’m get­ting ahead of myself.

I guess the only reas­on­able quick-answer is to first under­stand the busi­ness goal for the merged busi­ness. Once you under­stand that, you can begin to ask ques­tions about the goals for the new website.

Let me cre­ate a fic­tional example to help illus­trate the situ­ation, then dive into the six points, and then I’ll out­line a couple of things to think about for each of these points.

Obvi­ously there are many more things to con­sider, but this is a blog post and not a down­load­able eBook

Please leave your thoughts on what I’ve missed! I want to learn from you…now on to the example:

Ben’s Bikes (a local moun­tain bike retailer) has merged with Sammy’s ski and sports shop. Ben’s Bikes is a mar­ket leader in this region, with over 40% of the annual sales volume in new moun­tain bikes. They also have exclus­ive deal­er­ship agree­ments with a num­ber of the premier moun­tain bike man­u­fac­tur­ers in Europe. They have a very loyal and select cli­en­tele and are con­sidered the ‘go-to’ shop for all regional moun­tain bik­ing aficionados.

Sammy’s cycle shop is a gen­eral bicycle retailer. They don’t really spe­cial­ize, but they do have a wide selec­tion of mid-priced bikes in all cat­egor­ies (road, moun­tain, tour­ing, cruis­ing, kids, etc). They also have mul­tiple loc­a­tions in the local geo­graphic region.

The busi­nesses have merged and are oper­at­ing as Ben & Sammy’s cycle ther­apy. They have a small internal team tasked to man­age the web­site integration.

Now that we under­stand the land­scape, we go back to the quandary of the web­site. Let’s get to some import­ant questions:

photo credit: casey atch­ley

Audi­ence
These are the vis­it­ors to your site; your poten­tial or past cus­tom­ers. Ques­tions you should be ask­ing your team include:

• Who are you ser­vi­cing and what are their goals for using your web­site? This is basic and should be asked before any web­site is designed (or redesigned).
• What’s the busi­ness pur­pose? Is your web­site there to book appoint­ments, to take orders, or to provide a cata­logue of inform­a­tion? Your new site will depend on how well you answer that ques­tions, and how well your audi­ence under­stands that purpose.

photo credit: mar­cbel

Con­tent
This is what your audi­ence is look­ing for. Audi­ences con­duct research and order online.

• Invent­ory — both sites likely have sim­ilar con­tent, so which do you keep and which do you ditch? You can’t make con­tent decisions until you’ve eval­u­ated all the con­tent assets.
• What about con­tent unique to one business…is it still rel­ev­ant in the new busi­ness landscape?
• Keep only con­tent that sup­ports the audience’s abil­ity to ful­fill the busi­ness goals of the site. Everything else is distraction.

photo credit: inju

Google Juice
Both sites have some search engine pager­ank value. This is the value of
the page to a par­tic­u­lar set of search keywords or search term. It determ­ines how high the page appears in the Search Engine Res­ults Page (SERP) when a par­tic­u­lar phrase or keywords are searched upon.

• Determ­ine if pager­ank is really import­ant to your busi­ness needs, or not, and con­sider appro­pri­ate Search Engine Optim­iz­a­tion (SEO) tech­niques in your merge process.
• 301 Redir­ects — if you’re cre­at­ing a new domain, you’ll need to set these up to ensure that the search engines know that the pre­vi­ous busi­nesses haven’t van­ished, just merged. Set­ting them up can be a bit tech­nical but is very import­ant to ensure that vis­it­ors who’ve book­marked the old busi­ness pages are appro­pri­ately redir­ec­ted to the new site.

photo credit: per­reira

Ancil­lary touch­points
Over the devel­op­ment of the two pre­vi­ous web­sites, you’ll find that there may be some com­mu­nic­a­tion touch­points includ­ing RSS feeds, tag feeds or even
reg­u­lar email news­let­ters. You’re going to have to con­sider migrat­ing
all these to the new site.

• Now’s a good time to eval­u­ate the integ­ra­tion of your entire com­mu­nic­a­tion pro­cess. Where does web fit? How about RSS feeds of par­tic­u­lar con­tent streams…or news­let­ters? This is where your mar­ket­ing team will have some valu­able input too…really!
• If you’ve had a web­site, you’ve likely been meas­ur­ing traffic to that site. Well, since you’re mer­ging sites, now is the per­fect time to re-evaluate your web­site meas­ure­ment strategy. Will you con­tinue using the free util­it­ies or con­sider pur­chas­ing a ser­vice con­tract with a ser­vice pro­vider? What kind of report­ing do you need? What kind of decisions are you going to be mak­ing based on what kind of data?

photo credit: rob­hol­land

Chan­ging external link­ing
Both web­sites have been around for a while, and have a fair num­ber of inbound links from other sites and online articles.

• These help build pager­ank (Google Juice). Yes, they’ll auto­ma­gic­ally flow through when they hit the 301 redir­ects, but it’s also good to con­tact the sites dir­ectly and ask them to update their links. This is a great time to (re)establish com­mu­nic­a­tion with your web­site network…work the social side of the medium

photo credit: alq666

Pro­mo­tion on your old sites
Regard­less of all the work you do, your old web­sites will still be book­marked or linked in old email etc. If, per­chance, that someone does click on an old link, help them find your new location.

• Keep your old sites live for a year or two. Domain names are pretty cheap these days. After you’ve merged them into the new site, kill the old con­tent on the old sites (to reduce the size of the sites you’ll need to main­tain) and leave help­ful mes­sages on the appro­pri­ate land­ing pages. Use your ana­lyt­ics and server logs to determ­ine heav­ily vis­ited pages.

I’m not the expert…what do you think!
As I men­tioned, this is not a book, just a blog post. So, there are many more things to con­sder in the merge pro­cess. I’ve lis­ted a few above, but what do you think? What have I missed that I shouldn’t have? Leave your thoughts below.